AFRIpads took a good enough approach, rather than trying to sell sanitary pads to girls in Uganda, they manufactured cheap reusable pads locally.
Photograph: AFRIpads

In a previous life, I was the innovation manager of a division of a multinational consumer goods company. Now, I run an NGO dedicated to fighting hunger. Both organisations need innovation.

I think civil society organisations can learn quite a bit from business, from its processes, its instruments, its focus on results. One such concept is “disruptive innovation”. I don’t mean the panicky talk of making our NGO world redundant that’s so fashionable in development circles these days. What I mean is something new that creates a new market, in our case a new type of impact. Think of how Southwest Airlines made air travel affordable to normal people. None of the elements were new, but Southwest stripped the existing business model of flying down to the bare essentials of getting people from A to B. The concept of the low-cost airline was born, and a new market was created. The trick was not to focus on the perfect solution, but on the solution that was “good enough” for the job at hand.

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At my NGO Welthungerhilfe (one of Germany’s biggest), we’re using the same good enough approach. We have drilled boreholes and built wells for over 50 years now. As you would expect from a German organisation, our wells would make any engineer proud. They aren’t always the cheapest, but they get the job done, and they last. But durability isn’t always the main problem. Sometimes, the problem is that you simply can’t ship in material from the outside. Or, if you do, you don’t get spare parts easily if the well does need to be repaired. Or you need trained experts to do the maintenance. In these cases, sometimes there is indeed a better way.

In our case the good enough solution was a driller and a water pump made solely of locally available material that we developed and scaled with our partner organisation EMAS: a plastic tube and valves, galvanised steel, glass marbles. Nothing fancy, nothing more. It’s about minimal material investment and maximum output. At a fraction of the cost of a normal well (in fact, our well costs only 15% of a standard well), this opens up a new market for individual households as opposed to the communities who could afford wells before. It builds a new value chain for parts, assembly and maintenance in the region where the wells are being used. It is adapted to local standards, both financially and technology-wise. Yes, the well has limitations (it operates best in sandy soil), but where conditions are right, it’s good enough. In fact, so good enough that in Bolivia alone, more than 50,000 wells were built. We talk about technology innovation a lot, and we often mean high-tech solutions. But sometimes, innovation can be decidedly low-tech, and our manual pump is a case in point.

Another NGO taking the good enough approach is AFRIpads, a social enterprise based in Uganda. AFRIpads focuses on one very clear issue: the absence of sanitary hygiene for girls which leads to high drop-out rates at school. The normal solution would be to sell sanitary pads, but that is costly and impracticable in many hard to reach villages. AFRIpads found a new solution by going back to basics. They have created reusable sanitary pads manufactured locally in Uganda by women in a firm that operates as a social enterprise and channels proceeds back into the company. A standard pad may have been the technically perfect solution, but the reusable one was good enough. It created both a market and millions of opportunities for girls who would otherwise suffer from stigmatisation during their periods.

About 90% of all innovations fail. Companies spend a lot of money to test and qualify, but the development world doesn’t have those kinds of resources, and most donors like to fund ideas that are the least likely to fail. So, how can we improve the odds? Making a virtue out of necessity sometimes works best. If you eliminate “business as usual” as an alternative, your chances of successful adoption increase.

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Here’s how this worked for us in Sierra Leone. Welthungerhilfe had offered farmer field schools for a long time and with quite some success: we trained cocoa farmers to nurse, plant, harvest and market their produce. Then Ebola hit in 2011. Suddenly, gatherings of more than five people were forbidden. It could have been the end of our farmer field schools, but it forced us to think again. It forced us to go digital. We developed a digital farmer school for illiterate farmers that combined training with women empowerment, certification and market links. The result: costs per farmer decreased by 90%. A potential scaling up of this could reach millions of cocoa smallholder farmers in Africa. We have now reapplied the model in other countries. In Kenya, it formed the basis of an electronic marketplace for cattle – we call it “eBay for cows”. In Zimbabwe, the model was used to build a digital agriculture extension service.

The lessons learned for innovation in the development sector? For me there are three: the first is that disruptive innovation, the one that creates new markets, is based on the concept of good enough. Rather than go for the perfect solution, go for the cost-effective, smarter, leaner one. The second lesson is that, in order to get traction and maximise the odds of success, it pays to look for real problems on the ground, build up from what already exists, and try to eliminate the business as usualoption as an alternative. And lastly, that business tools such as the notion of disruptive innovation can be really useful in a development context. They have been created to sell more soap. Let’s use them to help us solve some of the world’s most pressing social problems. Let’s not leave the sharpest tools in the box to the capitalists.

Dr. Till Wahnbaeck is the CEO of Welthungerhilfe. For more information about their work click here.